How to: Building networked coalitions

By Blueprints for Change

Blueprints for Change how-to guides are put together by campaign innovators in order to help progressive organizers and groups up their game more quickly. The “blueprints” capture, communicate and inform innovative campaigning strategies and tactics. You can download BfC’s guides as pdfs from the Commons (see the box at the bottom of the page) or view the evolving Google docs.

Summary

When multiple groups and organisations come together to work on a campaign, they often opt to collaborate together in a coalition. Coalitions, however, have garnered a reputation for causing campaigners headaches due to their frequently slow, bureaucratic and top-down decision-making processes. In this guide, we look at an alternative way of building powerful collaborative campaigns. Networked coalitions, also called “networked campaigns”, harness the power of networks to develop more agile, dynamic and distributed campaigning coalitions that have proven themselves to be remarkably effective at building and channelling collective power.

Contents

• Disclaimer / request for your help 2
• Summary 2
• Why do we need to do coalitions differently? 2
• Who’s doing networked coalitions well? 3
• What do networked coalitions look like and how can they benefit a campaign? 4
• When this might not work for you 6
• What this requires (people, resources, etc.) 6
• Setup steps/ stages 12
• What success looks like for a networked coalition 15
• Tricky parts/ fixes 16
• Further resources 20
• Attribution 21

Download the pdf from the box below or see the latest Google doc version.

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Topics:

• Coalition Building
• Working in Groups

Collection:

• Blueprints for Change

Tags:

• Alliances_Allies_Coalitions_Partnerships
• Collaboration
• Collective action
• Organising - Community
• Organising - Distributed network

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